NORRIS, Thomas

The exact date of Norris’s birth cannot be established, but he may have been born sometime in the first half of Henry IV’s reign, for after his death one of his heirs claimed that he had been more than 80 years of age when he died.4 C1/100/61. Equally, his parentage remains obscure. It has been suggested that he was in some way descended from the Norris family of Bray, Berkshire, and thus a kinsman of Henry VI’s prominent servant John Norris*, but no evidence of their association (beyond the admittedly suggestive circumstance of John’s shrievalty of Wiltshire at the time of Thomas’s first two elections and their common Membership of four successive Parliaments) has been discovered. What is clear is that Thomas was an elder son, for he possessed two (possibly illegitimate) younger half-brothers.

Norris trained in the law and, while no details of his early education have come to light, before Easter 1450 he had been admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, where he was serving as escheator three years later.5 L.Inn Black Bks. i. 22, 23. Norris’s family owned three Wiltshire manors, Leigh Delamere (near Castlecombe), Chilvester (near Calne), and ‘Norres maner’ in Newton Toney, as well as scattered property in Swindon, Yatesbury, Sutton Benger, Wroughton and elsewhere in the county, which over the course of his life Norris augmented by further purchases. He may in addition have fulfilled the statutory requirement for residence in at least one of the boroughs he represented in the Commons, since by the latter part of his life he described himself at times as ‘of Devizes’. All told, by the time of Norris’s death, his Wiltshire holdings were thought to be worth nearly £33 p.a., probably a conservative estimate.6 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 479; C1/17/180; C67/52, m. 12.

Norris’s professional activities were, it seems, principally focused in his native shire.7 C1/17/180; 58/14; C67/47, m. 4. At the time of his first return for Devizes he was evidently connected with the leading men of the town, for among his clients were the clothiers John Coventre III* (who had represented the borough in the 1430s), and William Hendelove* (Norris’s parliamentary colleague in 1449 (Nov.) and 1450), while his associates included the lawyer John Whittocksmead* (a former MP for Devizes who joined Norris in the Commons in three Parliaments, sitting for other Wiltshire constituencies).8 CP40/756, rot. 337; 757, rot. 391; CPR, 1452-61, p. 461; CCR, 1461-8, p. 240. Throughout the 1440s he maintained a busy practice in the Westminster law courts, and if his clients were in the main his Wiltshire neighbours, they included men of national importance such as Sir William Beauchamp* (created Lord St. Amand in 1449) and his brother Richard (bishop of Salisbury from 1450), as well as the abbot of Stanley near Calne.9 CP40/733, att. rot. 3d; 735, att. rot. 2; 737, att. rot. 3; 738, att. rot 11; 740, att. rot. 9; 742, att. rot. 7; 743, rot. 3; 745, att. rot. 5d; 749, att. rot. 5d; 750, att. rot. 5d; 751, att. rot. 2; 752, att. rot. 6d; 774, att. rot. 5; KB27/736, att. rot. 1d; 737, att. rot. 2. Along with these local connexions went ties within the administration, for from the summer of 1446 he served as feodary of the duchy of Lancaster in Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset, a position which he would retain to the end of Henry VI’s reign, and which he perhaps owed to the good offices of his putative kinsman, John Norris.

It also seems likely that John, by now a leading member of the court circle dominated successively by the almost equally embattled dukes of Suffolk and Somerset played some part in starting Thomas on a parliamentary career which saw him elected and re-elected to no fewer than four successive Parliaments. These Parliaments spanned one of the most dramatic periods of Henry VI’s reign, encompassing the impeachment by the Commons, fall and murder of the duke of Suffolk, the loss of Normandy and Gascony, the south-eastern uprising of 1450, and Henry VI’s descent into madness. It is regrettably uncertain what part, if any, Norris played in the deliberations of the Commons during these upheavals, but it appears that he made time to pursue his private affairs to the detriment of his parliamentary duties. Thus, on 10 May 1450, when Parliament was in session at Leicester, Norris was by his own account at Westminster, where he delivered a sealed bond to the Chancery clerk William Godyng* for safe-keeping.10 CP40/781, rot. 416.

It may be a mark of Norris’s relative obscurity among the parliamentary burgesses that in spite of his repeated Membership of the Commons he did not subsequently come to play an enhanced part in public affairs. He was present at the Wiltshire county elections to the highly partisan Coventry Parliament of 1459, and may, indeed, have been regarded as rather too closely associated with Henry VI’s court, for not long Edward IV’s accession he was dismissed from his duchy office, while other long-serving holders of similar appointments, like George Howton* (a fellow Member in all of Norris’s Parliaments), were confirmed in post. Nevertheless, before long Norris was able to make his peace with the new rulers, and in 1467 was rewarded with an appointment as escheator of Wiltshire and Hampshire. There is no reason to suppose that his conduct in this office was particularly controversial, but he did subsequently take the precaution of suing out a general pardon to protect himself from legal challenges.11 C67/47, m. 4. If he (perhaps on account of his advancing years) did not hold further Crown office, he also successfully avoided the pitfalls of successive changes of ruler and dynasty. Instead, it seems, his energies were absorbed by a collection of trying relatives all of whom were anxious to secure a slice of the childless lawyer’s wealth. In about 1480 Norris’s nephew, Simon Litelcote, contracted a marriage between his sister Agnes and the Hampshire gentleman Richard Rithe, promising to pay her a dowry of 100 marks in return for a landed jointure of 20 marks p.a. which Rithe agreed to find. Litelcote asked Norris to become party to a bond guaranteeing the payment, which the lawyer refused to do. He did, however, apparently encourage the marriage, and may have promised informally to pay the 100 marks to Rithe, although he denied making any such promise when the latter sued him for the money some seven years later.12 C1/82/34-36.

Norris’s final years were dominated by the disposition of his property, driven by his lack of a direct heir. At the time of his death on 11 Apr. 1489 his heir-general was found to be his four-year-old great-niece Alice Litelcote, grand-daughter of his sister Joan, who had married Ralph Litelcote of Enford. If Norris had made a will (none is known to survive), it seems that rather late in the day, probably while already on his death-bed, he had a change of heart. On 26 Mar. he sealed a deed settling the bulk of his property on his two half-brothers, John and Richard Norris. Not long before, he had sold his manor in Newton Toney to John Mompeson*.13 CFR, xxii. 277; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 479. Yet, Alice Litelcote’s formidable mother Joan was not prepared to give up her daughter’s inheritance without a fight. Within a few months of Norris’s death she had begun litigation in Chancery in her daughter’s name, openly declaring that her former husband’s uncle had been senile long before his end. He had, so she stated, been over 80 at his death and ‘a iiij yere and more before his deth was sequestred from his wyttes and fro al maner of discrecion and fro that tyme iiij yere and before his deth and more till the oure of his deth he used no maner of reson’.14 C1/100/55-61. John and Richard Norris fought back, but by the autumn of 1493 Joan was in control of her daughter’s inheritance.15 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 758; C1/211/8. Yet, this was not the end of the matter, for now two other kinsmen, Edward Litelcote and Thomas Benger, whose claims to legacies of land from Norris had been overridden by Joan, appeared on the scene. For several years the court of Chancery was kept occupied by the various claims and counter-claims, but ultimately Joan emerged victorious.16 C1/146/2-4; 211/60; 235/26-27. In part, she may have owed her victory to her remarriage in 1496 to the former attorney-general and prominent Inner Temple lawyer Sir Morgan Kidwelly. Sir Morgan for his part was undoubtedly instrumental in arranging the sale in July 1498 of his stepdaughter’s wardship and marriage to a fellow lawyer, John Thornburgh, who within four years had married the heiress to his own son, Robert, thus ensuring that Norris’s lands found their way once more into the hands of a Lincoln’s Inn man.17 CPR, 1494-1509, p. 135; C1/272/23. After Kidwelly’s death in 1505, Joan Litelcote went on to marry the Somerset landowner Sir Edmund Gorges (whose grandfather, Sir William Oldhall*, had been Speaker of the Commons in 1450 when Norris represented Devizes for the second time), and went on to survive him as well as her first two husbands.